


Temperance

by Theoroark



Series: The Deck [4]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28240386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: Sojiro calls Genji Sparrow, because Genji is weak.-A tarot inspired Genji character study.
Relationships: Genji Shimada & Tekhartha Zenyatta, Jean-Baptiste Augustin/Genji Shimada, Jesse McCree & Genji Shimada
Series: The Deck [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619719
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Temperance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bloomingcnidarians](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomingcnidarians/gifts).



> For the incredible [Blooming,](https://twitter.com/bloomingjellies) please check out her art (including her [nsfw](https://twitter.com/bloomingnsfw)) & appreciate her!!!

Sojiro calls Genji Sparrow, because Genji is weak. 

Genji doesn’t remember the first time his father called him that, but he remembers the first time it hurt. He’s a child, and his father is talking to Hanzo about what he’s learning in history– his father always loved history, always had thick volumes on his bedside table. Genji’s interrupting with made-up, fantastical history of his own– crabs that spontaneously kill the emperor that Hanzo just mentioned, wars his father references being fought with carrots instead of swords. This made Hanzo laugh, the last time Genji did it. Now, their father snaps at him to be quiet. Genji can’t help himself; the fear and shame he feels overwhelms him. He runs. His father follows. 

“I don’t like it when you yell at me ‘cause you only want to talk to Hanzo,” Genji tells him. 

His father sighs. He shakes his head. “Sparrow, you’re far too sensitive.”

His father calls him Sparrow often over the decades that remain of his life. Genji tries to give him as little rationale as possible to repeat the latter charge. He cheats on his partners and shares their angry texts in his group chat. He relishes when he can get someone who swore they’d never speak to him again to end up back in bed with him.

He just laughs whenever his father scolds him for dropping out of college or getting another citation. When his father praises Hanzo, Genji makes sure to mutter some jab just loud enough for them to both hear. 

It doesn’t matter. Genji slips up, snaps to his father’s call when he thinks it’ll win approval. Gets flushed when his father reminds him how much smarter and more athletic and more disciplined Hanzo is. When he’s alone in his bed, he sometimes can’t breathe with how bad he feels. His feelings are too obtrusive for him to be better. Genji sees the look in his father’s eyes, and Genji knows he is still far too sensitive. 

-

Hanzo kills Genji, because Genji is weak.

In movies, the killer and the killed always share a dramatic stare as the sword is held in and blood gurgles out. Here, the smoke is too thick for Genji and Hanzo to see each other. Genji imagines he might die of suffocation before he dies of his wound. Genji doesn’t see it, just feels it, when Hanzo pulls the sword out. He just hears Hanzo do a sloppy little run away from him, then settle into a slower and steadier footfall when he realizes Genji can’t pursue him.

Genji tries to crawl, but he’s pinned. Part of him thinks that spending his last moments struggling, in pain, is stupid. Part of him thinks that there’s the smallest possibility he can escape, and what does he have to lose? He’s afraid to die, he realizes. As the smoke fills his lungs and smothers him, part of him thinks that Hanzo and his father and the rest were correct, he really can’t do anything right.

He comes to, head swimming, to two figures in fireproofed suits standing over him. “This him?” one of them asks in English.

The other kneels down. Their helmet visor is tinted and Genji can’t make out anything about them. They’re not firefighters, his brain muddles out through the toxic gas swamping it. They don’t have any emblem on them at all.

“Yeah,” they say. “Genji Shimada.” The first person swears, and a laser saw flashes on.

Blackwatch removes both of his legs and one of his arms. Angela does her best to enact the inhuman procedure as humanely as possible. She narrates much of what she does to Genji when he’s conscious– he can’t understand any of the scientific terms she’s saying but he understands what she’s going for. Genji sees her have terse conversations with Reyes, after which his planned training or active duty start date gets moved up.

She ropes McCree into it. Genji thinks that’s what happens, anyway. Maybe McCree would have made medbay visits without being prompted. Maybe McCree would have always been at his side when Genji’s introduced to the other Blackwatch members, his easy unflappability preempting the pity Genji was sure was coming. Maybe McCree would have kept extending invitations to the Blackwatch poker night, no matter how many times Genji turned him down. Angela’s friendship with McCree might just be another fruit of his affability, not the cause of it. 

As angry and numb as Genji is, he isn’t disciplined enough to commit to coldness. There are nights he sits with McCree and talks. McCree tells him about the time Reyes reached into wreckage and dragged him to Blackwatch. 

“I was just seventeen,” McCree tells him. He’s sitting in the corner across from Genji’s bed. Genji appreciates the space. “He told me it was Blackwatch or juvie. I remember at the time, I was all worried he was going to pull some bad movie, ‘reform the delinquent through the power of love’ shit on me.” He barks out a laugh. “Boy, was I glad when that wasn’t the case.”

He takes a long drag of his cigar. Genji knows that Angela’s going to smell it on his cybernetics tomorrow and wrinkle her nose, but ultimately she will decide against saying anything. “Did you ever reach out to your gang?” Genji asks. 

“Naw,” McCree says. “‘Course, Gabe didn’t have me working their beat. Guess he knew they were going to be much more pissed at me than I was at them.” He lowers his cigar and looks at Genji. With Genji’s improved vision, even in the dark he can see McCree looks sad. “Dunno if you’re pissed at all of them, though. If there are folks you want to talk to, let me know. I can try to work something out.”

Genji appreciates that. He also appreciates that McCree just nods and drops it when Genji tells him no. He wants it all gone. He appreciates McCree. 

There’s another possibility, too. There are moments when Genji stretches, flexing his scarred muscles, or takes off his faceplate. He’ll see McCree look a moment too long or look away a moment too fast. 

It scares Genji worse than any Shimada compound or hail of gunfire. It’s the most terrifying prospect he’s faced since the smoke and the sword. Genji throws himself into his mission single-mindedly, devoting every thought and movement to exterminating his family and his past. 

-

Zenyatta tells Genji he is not weak. 

Which is disconcerting, because Genji had assumed that was why Zenyatta was with him in the first place. Zenyatta finds him right after he was crashing at Fareeha and Angela’s apartment in Cairo. The two of them work long hours and Genji sleeps most of the time. It’s been vaguely sustainable, but Genji can still sense how frazzled they’ve become that he isn’t getting better. They gave him numbers for therapists and downloaded breathing exercise apps on his phone and he hasn’t touched any of them. It’s got to be insulting to them at this point. Genji needs to leave soon. 

He’s at the bus depot and has his duffel bag of worldly possessions over his shoulder and is trying to find the cheapest, furthest route when he registers the Omnic a couple seats away doing the same thing. Genji tries not to pay any attention to him. He has so much more to worry about. He doesn’t have any food on him, and barely enough money to book a ticket. He doesn’t know where he’s going to sleep, once he gets wherever he’s going. 

Genji gets on a bus headed north, up to Jordan. He collapses against the window and closes his eyes. He wakes up to a polite, synthetic voice asking, “Sir? That is your bag, isn’t it?” 

Genji opens his eyes. The Omnic from the station is sitting– no, floating– in the aisle in front of him. Next to the omnic is an incredibly guilty looking man holding his duffel. Genji glares at him. The man drops the bag and storms off the bus, whatever stop it’s made. 

“Thanks,” Genji says. He closes his eyes again. He hears the Omnic picking up his bag and stuffing it back overhead. Genji keeps his eyes shut, his head pressed against the window for a few minutes. When he looks up again the Omnic is seated next to him. 

“I’m fine,” Genji snaps. “I don’t need to be babysat.”

“I believe you,” the Omnic says. When Genji just keeps glaring at him in response, he adds, “My name is Zenyatta.”

Genji ignores him, closing his eyes and focusing on the cool window against what’s left of his face. Genji ignores Zenyatta when he follows him off the bus in Aqaba. Genji pretends to ignore Zenyatta when he points out an Omnic and cyborg friendly hostel. Genji pretends he already knew about it. 

Genji mutters a “thanks” when Zenyatta pays for his bed, and pretends it doesn’t infuriate him. 

He travels with Zenyatta after that. Genji tells himself at first it’s because it keeps him from getting mugged or sick or whatever, like he did before Angela invited him to crash. Zenyatta gets him access to Shambali monasteries in all the cities the organization is stationed in. That’s food, shelter, and security while Genji wanders around town and tries to find something there he cares about. Genji tells himself that the Omnic feeling like he’s helping is a small price to pay for all of that. 

But after a few months, Genji starts to wonder. Zenyatta’s so patient, so clever, so popular with the Shambali monks. There must be a reason someone like that is spending time with someone like him. Zenyatta must actually be helping him, some way Genji can’t discern yet. It simply does not make sense that Zenyatta would waste so much of his time on Genji otherwise. 

There’s one night where Genji asks him about it. They’ve just arrived in Almaty. Zenyatta is welcomed with excitement by the other monks, and Genji gets some of that kindness by proxy. He tries to reciprocate it. But after just half an hour of standing in the musty temple common room, far too hot from all the Omnics operating in it, far too loud from all the chatter between friends, Genji finds the moment where no one’s talking to him and he can’t figure out who to talk to intolerable. He ducks out to the temple steps and sits down.

Genji thinks back to his younger days, when he went out to clubs and cheated on partners and laughed when his name was in gossip blogs. He isn’t sure why he cared so little about what people thought of him then, and now the idea that the monks resent his presence is terrifying. He thinks it might be because before, he had at least hoped his family would be there for him, no matter what.

“Are you okay?”

Genji doesn’t respond. Zenyatta settles down next to him on the steps. “I didn’t know where you’d gone, when I didn’t see you,” Zenyatta says. “I’m glad you didn’t go far.”

“Am I doing any better?” Genji asks.

Zenyatta cocks his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, in the time we’ve been traveling together. Have you seen me improve like– at all?”

“Improve?” Zenyatta repeats. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Yes you do,” Genji snaps. “You know what I’m like. You just had to make excuses for it, with all your friends.” Zenyatta’s voice crackles on, but Genji cuts him off. “I don’t know how to belong, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to act. You’re trying to help me, right? Have you seen me make like, any progress? Or am I just a lost cause?”

Genji avoids looking at Zenyatta for a while, keeping his head bent down, staring at the corrugated metal step. When Genji does look at him, it takes him a moment to parse Zenyatta’s reaction. Zenyatta’s an Omnic, there’s no furrowed brow or slightly open mouth to diagnose. But he’s been traveling with Zenyatta for a while, and the sheer novelty of it gives him away. All the time they’ve been wandering, Genji’s never seen Zenyatta lost before.

“I know you’re in pain,” Zenyatta says, when he finally speaks. “And I try to help you, sometimes. But I help many people, and I don’t travel with all of them. You are quick. You’re very experienced, but you still wish to learn new things. And you are funny, when you let yourself make jokes.”

“Thanks,” Genji says. He can’t look at Zenyatta anymore, but he feels Zenyatta put a hand on his shoulder.

“I will be happy to teach you about the Shambali,” Zenyatta says. “But you are not just my student. You are my friend. Because of that, I do not think I can create some objective measure of your progress, even if I was trying to. I like you. At any given point, that is the most relevant thing I know about you.”

Genji flinches, when he first feels the clink of metal on metal. When he realizes Zenyatta is simply attempting a very awkward diagonal hug, he relaxes, and adjusts to help Zenyatta out.

-

Baptiste sets up his improvised medbay not far from the Shambali temple in Suravassa. He treats people’s neglected wounds and poorly-set bones, the monks feed people and give them counsel. It’s inevitable their paths will cross, but Genji almost feels like Baptiste’s avoiding it. When he arrives near the corner where Baptiste has set up to distribute lunches, the medic always seems to bustle off to some house call right when Genji’s walking over to introduce himself.

Genji would take it more personally, but he imagines it can’t be intended. He gets plenty of secondhand contact with Baptiste, and everyone tells him how kind Baptiste is, how friendly, how disarmingly charming. He treats cyborgs with astonishingly sophisticated tech, for no cost, so it’s not prejudice. Genji knows he’s just being insecure.

It takes carrying a kid to get treatment for Genji to get in the same room as Baptiste. When he does, he can tell everything he’s been told is true. Baptiste looks calm and speaks in a soft, friendly tone the entire time he’s stitching up the whimpering kid’s arm. He earnestly tells them how proud he is of them at the end, and the kid beams through their tears. When the kid’s mother arrives, Baptiste pulls out reading glasses as he writes down instructions on how to keep the stitches in. And Baptiste looks even cuter with the glasses on.

“The temple holds community dinners once a week,” Genji tells Bapiste, after the mother and child have left. “There’s one tonight. You should come. I don’t think you’ve met many of us.”

Baptiste pauses. He’s in the doorway of his tent, and Genji’s hit with a pang of fear that he’ll leave. He thinks through the little he knows about Baptiste. Smart, hot, mysterious. Mysterious because he travels a lot. Genji grasps for the worldliest thing he can find in Suravassa.

“Some of the monks have learned how to play Lúcio covers,” Genji says. Baptiste raises an eyebrow. “It’s, uh, definitely an experience. At least.”

Baptiste smiles. “I’m a big fan too,” he says. “I think I have to come now.” Genji nods, deeply grateful his face plates hide his blush, and Baptiste exits the tent. 

Baptiste arrives late enough to the dinner that Genji has time to get anxious about it. Which means Zenyatta notices when Genji straightens up and stares at the door, instead of just sneaking constant glances at it. “That is the medic in town, yes?” Zenyatta asks him.

“Yes,” Genji says.

“He’s quite handsome, isn’t he?”

“Shut up,” Genji hisses. Zenyatta laughs. Baptiste makes eye contact with Genji and waves. Genji waves back as casually as he can. He thinks it ends up just coming off as a salute instead. 

Baptiste is flagged by a monk carrying a fresh plate of food. Genji watches him out of the corner of his eye. “Aren’t you going to invite him over?” Zenyatta asks.

“Don’t.” 

“I do not think that is bad advice! You are the one who invited him here.”

“Ugh.” A group of people move towards the kitchen, obscuring Baptiste from Genji’s view. “Look, if he doesn’t sit here on his own, I’ll go over and talk to him at some point, okay?”

“‘At some point.’”

“I will!” Genji insists. Zenyatta sighs. Then his forehead dots blink, then shine a little brighter. Genji follows his gaze.

Baptiste isn’t where he last saw him. He isn’t in the room at all. Zenyatta doesn’t have to nag him. Genji gets up and leaves the temple on his own.

Baptiste is standing on the steps, and turns when he hears Genji coming. He looks tired. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just–”

“It’s fine,” Genji says. “There are a lot of people there.”

“Yeah,” Baptiste says. “It’s a lot.” He says it far too quickly for it to be true. Genji waits. Baptiste sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I want to stay.”

Genji wants to believe him. “What’s stopping you?”

Baptiste sits down. Genji walks down the staircase and sits next to him. “You’re a monk, right?” Baptiste asks him. Genji makes a vague noise. “You’re close enough?”

Genji laughs. “I can’t judge you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Yeah.” Genji nods. “I made mistakes when I was younger. And those mistakes mean people are still after me. And I just… really don’t want the Shambali to get caught in the crossfire.”

“People in the Shambali have pasts too,” Genji says. Baptiste sighs.

“Not like that.”

“I was in Blackwatch,” Genji says.

“I was in Talon,” Baptiste responds. The two stare at each other for a moment. Then they laugh. Genji knows it’s mostly fear. 

“Does this make us ex-coworkers?” Baptiste asks.

“I wouldn’t know,” Genji says. “I left when things started to get bad.” 

“Smart man.” Baptiste smiles and looks around them. Genji does too. The street’s empty, the noise within the temple hides their conversation. Baptiste continues. “But you get why I want to leave here then, right?”

“Leave Suravassa?”

“I’ve been here a long time,” Baptiste says. “Longer than normal. If I put down roots, that puts the people around me in danger.”

“Leave Suravassa, immediately after you’re handed a plate of curry. That exact moment is the correct time.” Baptiste looks away. “I’m not judging you.”

“Of course not. You’re a monk.”

“Shut up,” Genji says, and Baptiste laughs. “I’m just saying. People like having you around. I don’t think you’ll be helping by leaving as much as you think you will.”

Baptiste tilts his head up. Genji can’t read his expression. “Besides,” Genji adds. “They haven’t even started playing music yet. You owe me a dance.”

The corner of Baptiste’s mouth twitches. “I don’t remember promising anything.”

“But you want to,” Genji says. For a second, he feels like his younger playboy self, but it doesn’t feel as desperate as it did then. Everything feels easier now, he realizes. Maybe not easy. But every laborious step he took got him to easier.

“I think I can spare a dance,” Baptiste says. And he lets Genji take his hand, and lead him back into the temple.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m [@tacticalgrandma](https://twitter.com/tacticalgrandma) on twitter if you want to talk to me there!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and any comments or kudos would mean the world to me 💜


End file.
